engaging stories of enduring beauty

outlining

The last time I was drafting a novel, I used checklists, maps, house plans, foam boards, photos, a loose outline, and a bunch of notes to keep myself on track. It worked beautifully. That manuscript, working title The Bone Garden, is making the rounds among some literary agents I deeply respect. I have high hopes for it to be my debut novel.

But in the meantime, I’m beginning my work on a new manuscript. This time around I’m doing some of the same preparatory work. I’ve been busy reading background material and making notes.

I’ve managed to outline the first half of the book and am already adding notes to it.

I’ve been spending a lot of time simply focusing on who my protagonist is and where she is coming from, work that I’ve not done quite as much of on the front end in the past.

I’m doing much more of this preparatory backstory work now because I’m hoping to write in a very deep first person point of view, and it’s hard to do that if you don’t know your protagonist intimately from the very start.

I’ve made a list of big thematic questions that will be considered in the course of the story. I’ve even written the beginnings of a query letter to focus my mind on the core story.

All of this preparation amounts to me being able to start off the drafting process with a clear idea of where I’m going and how I’m going to get there. Every day new information falls into place. Every day I add to my little notebook. Every day the story takes up more permanent residence in my brain.

And on November 1st, the first day of NaNoWriMo, it will begin to take up residence on the page.

Ideally, we would all have time to work regularly on our writing projects, never allowing the fire to cool or the story to get stale. But reality is rarely ideal. It’s reality. It’s busy times at work, kids who need love, meals that need making. Those clothes won’t wash themselves, you know. So we often find ourselves torn away from our works-in-progress for a time and they turn into works-in-the-backs-of-our-minds. Sometimes we wander away from our writing fairly purposefully when we aren’t sure what comes next.

Either way, how do you get back in the groove after an absence? Here are three easy ways…

Reread. If it’s been just a few days, reread the last chapter. If it’s been more than a week or so, read what you have written so far, from the first to the last page, to get yourself not only back into the story, but also to reorient yourself to the flow of the story thus far. It’s more than simply figuring out where to go next. It’s recapturing the flow, the voice, the tension, the characters, the setting. Immerse yourself in it as a first-time reader would and you’ll be propelled forward in the story by the momentum you’ve hopefully built up. Plus you’ll see if what you’ve written thus far still holds up after letting it rest. You can also listen to what you’ve written, which gives the story another dimension altogether.

Outline. After that, see if you can outline what happens in the next few chapters. It helps to have at least a small idea of the road ahead. Just seeing a paragraph of synopsis (which I tend to write before an actual chapter is written) can almost trick you into thinking you’ve already written that chapter and give you a small feeling of accomplishment, which you can then ride into the actual writing of that chapter. Then, when it’s written, you can go back and tweak your synopsis to match what you actually wrote. In this way you are also finishing a chapter-by-chapter synopsis to put into your book proposal later. Two birds, one stone.

Research. Read over any research notes you may have taken to put you back into that world and spark your imagination with possibilities for your characters. If you are writing anything besides contemporary fiction that is set in a city like your own, you need to put yourself back in the right place, the right time period, and the right clothes. You need to pick up those speech patterns you’ve given your characters. You need to reorient yourself to that world, reintroduce yourself to its problems.

For about the past year I’ve been in some nebulous writing space when it comes to my next novel. While I’ve been pounding out short stories each month, I’ve also been furiously scribbling notes in parks, in the car, at restaurants, and at my desk. I’ve been creating massive family trees and designing sets. I’ve been writing scenes and sketching outlines and placing them aside, not quite sure where to go next.

I’m calling this conglomeration of activities the “germination stage” of the new novel. And this past week the germination phase came to a close as I entered the “gathering stage.”

A little bit at a time, I have gathered together what seem like the best of my ideas and put them into a structure I think will work for telling my story, which will span from 1859 to the present, encompassing several generations of a family’s history, but which I have determined I will tell through three separate POV characters. The scope of this novel has created unique structure issues for me (my first novel takes place over a few months and was written entirely from one perspective). The uncertainty about just how to tell the story has stymied my efforts to actually write the thing. So last week I sketched out 30 chapters and essentially outlined the entire novel, something I’ve not done successfully in the past.

In addition to the outline, I’ve gathered scads of images: railroad maps, house plans, photos indicating clothing styles and covering historical events, garden designs and tree profiles, quilt designs and furniture examples, photos indicating mood and available technology. I’ve taped all of these to two pieces of foam board (connected in the middle with packing tape so they fold up and can be made to stand up on the floor or a table). It’s sort of a primitive Pinterest board where I can see everything without accessing the internet (which, generally, one should avoid doing if one wants to get any writing done).

The process of gathering is just as beneficial to me as the actual product. It makes me review everything I’ve been thinking of, makes me order events in my mind, makes me realize where events need to be foreshadowed in earlier chapters, shows me what I need to research. The product itself (the boards) will serve as a road map for my writing and as inspiration when words aren’t coming easy.

Sometimes we have an idea for a story that balloons so much that it’s hard to keep everything straight in our heads and we lose sight of the main thrust of the narrative we want to create. In times like these, going through your own unique process of gathering and ordering your ideas is so useful. Now that I have all of these words and images on my little idea boards, I feel mentally ready to start tackling this project. Everything is there, I just need to breathe life into it.

Have you been avoiding a big writing project because you just didn’t know where to start or how it would all hang together? Perhaps you should try making it more visual. Get it out of your head and into reality and maybe you’ll find the pieces fitting together in ways you hadn’t anticipated.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, since my gathering is done, I need to get on to the next–and most exciting–step: writing a world into being.

During the past week my husband and I have been scheming. We’ve developed a plan to pay off our remaining debt (funny how having a child can completely derail your life for awhile) and get our house ready to sell sometime next year. With our son starting kindergarten this fall in a school system that is beyond inadequate, it’s time to consider one of the many nice communities around Lansing (all with highly rated school systems and lower crime rates) for our next house. We want something bigger with a larger yard further away from busy streets now that we have a little guy who is keen on spreading his wings a bit. And we have the plan in place to help us make it happen.

Here’s why a plan is essential to an undertaking like this. If you have a long term goal that’s big, you are far more likely to be successful if you break it down into smaller goals. A plan helps keep you on track, marking completion of the little goals and constantly reminding you of the ultimate goal. And it shows you how far you are toward accomplishing it.

The plan can seem restrictive. When you’re paying down debt, for instance, you need to be strict with yourself to keep from veering off course. Yes, it would be super fun to go out to eat twice a week, but we have our future house to think of. Yes, it would be great to go on vacation this summer, but we have our son’s education and safety to think of. Yes, I would like to make goat cheese and gourmet olives part of my daily caloric intake, but I have a goal that is bigger than goat cheese.

And when you don’t have a plan in place that shows you exactly how and when you will accomplish your goal, it’s really easy to wander off track. Just for a while, we tell ourselves, but then one day runs into another and another and another and we can find that we are still as far from accomplishing that goal as when we started.

The same is true (I am finding) in writing. I have a lot of novels started, but only one finished. I have a lot of ideas, but I can’t bring them all to fruition at once. So I need both an end goal (write a novel) and a real, concrete plan to get there. I currently have my next novel planned out with Scrivener, and I have set dates by which each scene should be written (two per week) and an average word count goal for each scene. Following this schedule, I will have the first draft written by mid-September, I will write the proposal in October, and I will revise the draft in November. By the end of the year, I will be thinking about shopping it.

The mere thought of a schedule may make some of you cringe. But for me, for now, it is what is going to help me reach a goal.

Where’s the freedom in that, you may ask? It takes a lot of pressure and negativity off of me because I know if I simply follow it, I will reach the goal. I don’t have to continually rethink and re-strategize. It frees me to say no to other things so that I can focus on writing. It allows me to be happy with just 1700 words in a writing session because that is all that is required of me at a time. I can write 10,000 in a day, but I really only have to write 1700 twice a week. Freedom to pace myself.

In five months I’ll have my next novel drafted. In a year we’ll put our house on the market. We have our plans in motion and all we have to do is stick to them.

Have you planned how you will reach your writing or other creative goals?

Last night I downloaded the trial version of Scrivener and went through the very lengthy but mildly entertaining tutorial. Then I started fiddling. A day later I have a huge and growing character list with descriptions, a few settings drawn out, and an entire novel outlined with chapter synopses written.

Oh my goodness, I love this program. When I wrote my first manuscript I wrote it start to finish, no outline to speak of until I was halfway through writing it and finally knew where I wanted it to go (and where it wanted to go, frankly). The thought of conceiving of an entire novel and outlining each scene struck me as very difficult. Maybe impossible for me, despite the fact that I’m a fairly organized person (stop laughing, Mom). Hence, though the program sounded intriguing, it also sounded daunting and pedantic.

But here I sit, book one of a series completely outlined and waiting to be written. Books 2-4 have been loosely sketched out (like we’re talking major plot arcs, nothing detailed). And I feel great about it.

If you’ve never given Scrivener a try, I urge you to check it out. You can try it free for 30 days (non-consecutive, meaning 30 real days whether taken all at once or stretched out over 10 years) and it’s only $40 to buy. A super cheap tool to help you get your story organized (or organised as they, being British, would spell it) and get yourself a large part of the way down the road to having actually written out that book.

It has a ton of features to help you, including tools to organize and access your research; format your work depending on what it is (nonfiction, novel, screenplay, short story, etc.); track characters, themes, and keywords; and tons more I can’t remember because that tutorial was so dang long.